“It is a pleasure to hide, but a disaster not to be found,” writes Winnicott. Yet in our various games of hide-and-seek we still see what lingers even as it slips away. Blanchot writes, “When concealment appears, concealment having become appearance, makes ‘everything disappear,’ but of the ‘everything disappears’ it makes another appearance.” At the heart of Winnicott’s developmental theory and clinical work and Blanchot’s literary theory and works of fiction is the puzzle of “disappearance as appearance.”

In our clinical encounters we may no longer just look for comprehension, but now find fascination. Concepts like transitionality, subjectivity, and communication in scientific discourse often reference what we already know. What is required is an “interruption,” philosophical and literary, to allow us to continue gazing “in fascination” at what has disappeared. The point might be philosophical, but the implications are still therapeutic. We meet the image and the other, witness the invisibility of what is still there, and eventually participate within language. It is no longer merely a matter of conceptually or descriptively naming the absent; rather, the possibility and challenge is there to discover and make “languages for the presence of things.”